ECE News Story

Alumnus Hamid Jafarkhani wins IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award

Alumnus Hamid Jafarkhani (1997 EE Ph.D.) is a co-recipient of the IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) "for contributions to block signaling for multiple antennas."

The prestigious award is presented to an individual or team of not more than three for outstanding contributions to communications technology. Jafarkhani shares the award with Vahid Tarokh (Harvard University) and Siavash Alamouti (Vodafone, Great Britain).

The award was established in 1995 and is named in honor of Eric E. Sumner, IEEE President for 1991, who retired as vice president of operations planning at AT&T Bell Laboratories after a long and distinguished career. It is sponsored by Bell Labs.

Jafarkhani's research interests are in communication theory with emphases on coding, wireless communications, and wireless networks. He and his colleagues invented "space-time block coding," a MIMO technology, that has become an active area of research and is widely used in practice. His current work, for which he won the Sumner Award, is on the theoretical and practical challenges of designing communication systems and networks that use multiple antennas.

At Maryland, Jafarkhani was advised by former University of Maryland Provost Nariman Farvardin (ECE/ISR).